Dave Bidini is living on the edge (plus, the Rheostatics frontman responds to your questions in song!)

Dave Bidini keeps his record collection alphabetized. Draw the Line by Aerosmith begins in his kitchen and One Size Fits All by Frank Zappa ends beside his piano, in the living room. Bidini has pretty much devoted his life to music, both writing about it and performing, so at 48 years old the father of two sees it as his duty to keep the spirit of rock ’n’ roll young, vibrant and alive.

“You get to a certain age and it’s: ‘This sucks and that sucks, the music industry sucks and all music just sucks.’ I’ve gone to that place, but you have to keep your head above water. If I’m not looking around, I’m dead,” Bidini says in his west end Toronto home, where guitar cases and pages of sheet music are losing a fight with children’s toys for space on the floor. “I’m aware of the fact that bands in their forties and fifties dinosaur-out, but I’m not accepting that because when music’s not on the edge it loses its essence. As an older musician, it’s on you to show kids that you don’t have to trade it in — ever.”

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In the Rock Hall, a title taken from an old Paul Quarrington poem, is the name of the second album by Bidiniband, the group Bidini formed in 2007 after the dissolution of The Rheostatics, the much-loved Canadian indie rock band. Featuring Doug Friesen on bass, Don Kerr on drums and Paul Linklater on guitar, the seeds for Bidiniband were planted when Linklater, from Kilarney, Man., won a CBC contest by designing a new Canadian currency with the faces of The Rheostatics on the bill.

“Paul got to go backstage at a Rheos show, and he and the band later became friends,” says Friesen, 33, who also recounts the tale of how Linklater stayed at Bidini’s home to explore Toronto for the first time while Bidini was in Italy, working on the 2005 book that would become Baseballissimo. “We had a Rheostatics-sized hole to fill and having Dave write music again was a way for all of us — including Dave — to fill that hole.”

Bidini still feels a hole when he thinks about The Rheos, and says he was moved when they all showed up at his last Bidiniband record release show. At that point, the old friends hadn’t even been talking, and Bidini compares the breakup of the band to a death.

“I was sitting in a room feeling sorry for myself, like a big chunk of me had been removed,” he says. “Then, ultimately, you realize the person doesn’t have to suffer anymore and after we made that first Bidiniband record, I felt like I’d walked through a door.”

The new Bidiniband record is a snarling, jangled, blistering affair, referencing Bidini’s entire record collection — Aerosmith to Zappa — with a healthy dose of Small Faces, The Guess Who, Fugazi and Elvis Costello mixed in. Currently working on the film version of Baseballissimo with in-demand Canadian actor Jay Baruchel (the film is in part produced by Rush’s Geddy Lee), Bidini also recently celebrated the publication of Writing Gordon Lightfoot, his 10th book. (His columns also regularly appear in the National Post.)

However, on this cold Sunday afternoon in Bidini’s kitchen, he seems most excited about music, exclaiming how important it was that the album’s 11 new tunes weren’t overly polished. Most of the songs, he says proudly, were recorded after only being played live a few times.

“You do a song once and it’s fantastic; you do it three or four times and it’s great; the fifth time, if you play it again, you kill it,” he says. “On this record, we wanted to pick the fruit when it was sweetest. The most important thing was the heat.”

Inside the Music Hall is out Jan. 24 on Maple Music. For more on Bidiniband, visit davebidini.ca. Did you email in to ask Dave Bidini a question last week? Watch the video below, in which the Rheostatics frontman responds to your queries in song!